‘A Kind of Freedom,’ by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

By R.O. Kwon

September 7, 2017

Photo: Ben Krantz

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton precedes her moving debut novel, “A Kind of Freedom,” with a title-providing quotation from Edwards P. Jones’ “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” It consists of a single long sentence, layered with significance: “They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had been born with — the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.”

This epigraph shadows Sexton’s multigenerational novel, perhaps especially in its most hopeful, opening pages. “A Kind of Freedom” begins with Evelyn, who, as the oldest child of Louisiana’s first black physician, has grown up in relatively prosperous circumstances. She lives in a “fancy house” with “baskets of fresh watered ferns adorning its porch, the pansies and petunias on either side of the long, winding driveway.” Her father, she knows, has a good life — “most Negro men they knew tipped their hats at him on the way to church; everybody called him sir” — but she also knows he wants still more for his children, particularly for Evelyn. She’s the most like him: studious, determined and at the top of her nursing-school class.

This is New Orleans in 1944, though, and Evelyn’s father is conscious of how easily that more could elude his child. When she starts dating Renard, who’s also studying medicine, but has no money, her father’s afraid of what the union will bring Evelyn, the effect it might have on her future. “He’s a low-class man,” he says. “Not middle, middle I could take, I could do something with it, but low.” He’s promised himself, he adds, that Evelyn won’t have to fight her way through life. “It’s already hard enough,” he says. “I won’t make it harder, I can’t. I promised myself that.”

But it’s not a promise he can keep on Evelyn’s behalf, and, before long, he runs up against the limits of his ability to continue protecting his child. She’s in love, and thinks him harsh, his logic unfounded. Then, through no fault of his own, Renard runs out of money for his studies. He has to drop out; once he’s no longer enrolled in school, he’s drafted for World War II; missing him, Evelyn loses the ability to focus on books, and has to leave nursing school. Without the medical degrees they’d planned to secure, the couple’s material hopes decline, and the rest of “A Kind of Freedom” tracks how these reduced expectations affect them, as well as ensuing generations.

And while it’s true that to parent is also to contend with the limits of one’s ability to protect a child, not all parents have to dread the effects of systemic racism directed against their offspring. In “A Kind of Freedom,” Sexton details some of the many ways racism adds to the difficulties faced by Evelyn and Renard, then their children, Jackie and Sybil, then Jackie’s son, T.C., and then T.C.’s infant son, Malik. Most obviously pernicious are the Jim Crow laws dividing 1940s New Orleans, and though those laws are eventually abolished, the racial injustice, of course, persists. The white police officer who extorts money from Renard in 1944 is comparable to the white officers who, decades later, in 1986, brutalize a young black man on Jackie’s street, to the police who stop T.C., then arrest him for marijuana possession in 2010 — “right around election time,” his grandmother observes.

The inequities go on and on, a point powerfully emphasized by the novel’s structure, which splits “A Kind of Freedom” into short sections centered on Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. Ingeniously, Sexton tells Evelyn’s story, then Jackie’s, then T.C.’s, then cycles back to Evelyn, and so on, zigzagging from the past to the future, and back again, until the different eras almost feel like one relentless present day. In turn, Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. become parents; in turn, their own dreams thwarted, they each look forward to a better life for their children, aspirations that the book, with its hopscotch timeline, has already diminished, even revoked.

When Renard is drafted, he tells Evelyn, “I wonder if this is our ticket to full manhood in this country. Maybe if not for me, for my child.” Between 1944 and 2010 — and 2017 — so much changes, though not enough, and the past is anything but past.

R.O. Kwon’s first novel, “Heroics,” is forthcoming from Riverhead in the summer of 2018. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.